Starbound: Things I learned on the first night of playing.

Tonight, the beta for Chucklefish’s new game, Starbound, finally became open (to those of us who have supported the game by pre-purchasing). Note: If you do not want to have anything of the Starbound experience spoiled, please don’t read this. There are no story spoilers (I haven’t found much of the story yet), but some crafting/building spoilers.

Quickly described, Starbound is a spiritual successor to the very successful game Terraria. In fact, due to having one of the same developers on the team, Starbound is pretty similar to Terraria…On some points.

The basics of building may be more intuitive for someone who played a lot of Terraria (which I, unfortunately, did not). Here are a few things I learned (see the screenshot below for reference):

Your Matter Manager (I’m pretty tired, but I *think* that’s what the multitool you basically start with is called) can be used to fell trees, dig up stuff and break down built stuff. It’ll take a fair while though, so it is definetely worth the materials to build yourself a set of Tools.

To place a door, you must have a block both above and below it.

You can either place a block of tree (or almost any other block) in a “big” block (as seen by the ground level floor), or as a small single-block as seen on the top floor walls and ceiling. To place a small block, hold down shift while placing it.

Avoid freezing to death at night, either by having plenty of sources of warmth (like the furnace and fireplace), and / or by placing walls in the background of your house. In the current screenshot, going to the top floor (where there is not a wall in the background) would cause my “warmth” / “freezing” meter to show up, and gradually decline.

On the topic of background walls: Place them by right-clicking . It seems like you need to place them with a “floor” – I was not able to just place my background walls willy-nilly. I had to start from the floor, and build my way up.

On the topic of flipping items around: Support Beams (as seen on the first floor with the bed) are, by default, flipped from left to right (as seen in the left side of the screenshot). These set pieces are context sensitive, and will flip over to the “right” (or other) side once they get close enough to a wall. Another set piece that is context sensitive is the yarn spinner on the top floor of my house.

Sleeping in a bed will heal damage taken. I presume that a higher quality bed will heal damage faster – the Wooden Bed is none too fast. Hopefully the Iron Bed will heal at a faster rate

Tools such as the Pickaxe and the Axe have durability that will eventually run out. It seems like the standard Stone tools last pretty long, so it’s not Minecraft levels of annoyance at the beginning tools.

One of the interesting ways that Starbound differs from Terraria is that there are Quests in Starbound. The first few help you get set up, so a completely new player should hopefully be less confused than a completely new player of Terraria.

The soundtrack to Starbound is pretty damn excellent so far. I can easily see the soundtrack helping me on marathon sessions of Starbound in the future!

Once I have more time to play the game, I’ll probably get into making some guides for the game, and possibly a Let’s Play. Luckily, Chucklefish seem to have given the green light for Youtubers to do their thing.

6 months agoby NerdEssentialsExcelsior, true believers! I'm having a BLAST playing the Spider-Man game on PS4! The only problem is that photo mode; I keep goofing around, trying to get cool screenshots #spidermanps4#playstation#marvel